Many different people argue over how much influence a family should have in delivering and controlling another family member's care, there are policies that are put in place so that people can have health care when it is needed. The problem with this is that only so much can be done without other family member's input. To make sure that most areas are covered in whether or not family member's influence delivery of health care, there will be a look at different areas such as family, social policy, psychology and sociology thought out the essay.
There are many different definitions the one most commonly used is from the World Health Organisation (WHO) "Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. "(1946), this quote really does explain that health is not just one thing, and that there are different areas that need to be looked at when someone is ill. This is taken into nursing as Wright and Leahey (1990) believe that a holism by taking in consideration the patients as a family member but traditionally nursing was an individualistic approach.As family is an important part of patient care you need to look at what contributes as a family, the reason for this is because over the years what is classed as a family has changed, Macionis and Plummer (2005) descried a family as a "social institution that unites individuals into co- operative groups that over see the bearings and raising of children" but Hanson (2005) states that there is no one definition of what a family is, the reason for this is that family means different things to different types of people.Hanson (2005) also looks at same- sex couples, how levels of same-sex couples are increasing, and how it is not being looked at as, 'abnormal'. This shows how over the last seventy years families have changed as a traditional British family used to be a married mother and father with the average "2.
46" children,(http://www. statistics. gov. uk/cci/nugget. asp? id=762) but this has changed to "1. 8" children in 2006 (http://news.
bbc. co. uk/1/hi/uk/7071611. stm).Also as divorce has become easier there are many lone parent families, more people having children before marriage and many couples that have no children but class themself's as a family. Most people class their family as the people that they live with Robb (1998) identifies this by explaining that there are two main family structures "the nuclear and extended".
A nuclear family is classed as two married parents with children; an extended family is your grandparents, aunties and uncles. The typical nuclear family has changed in the U.K. as in 1971 there was 52% of British families with dependent children, where as in 2007 there is only 36% of nuclear families with dependent children(http://www. statistics.
gov. uk/downloads/theme_social/Social_Trends38/Social_Trends_38. pdf). There are many factors that affect the reason for why there is a decrease in the traditional nuclear family, these are the way in the fact that peoples working conditions have changes as many women seek to have a career, so leave having children to later in their life so there are less births.From this more people are moving away from their home towns to find better employment further afield, as fifty years ago many people would find work closer to their family. The reason for this is because many social trends have changed and family want to support their own family financially, so that they can get better housing, schooling, lifestyle, health care and many other things.
Even though these social trends may have changed the concept of the way a family survives is the same and it all has an impact on society. A family as a whole unit has an impact on society, because the way one family acts influences another.All families have a big role in how we lead our life, as from the day we are born the people in our family that bring us up, teach us how we should function and live our lives. This is normally learnt from our parents as they teach us basic skills to be able to function in society. The problem with this is that we could learn things that are not so good for our health such as not having a healthy diet, smoking, drinking, drugs, violence and many other things.
A psychologist Albert Bandura (1963) did an experiment that showed that children learn from their parents, this test was called Bobo doll experiment.Albert has some children and he got the parents to act aggressive by hitting and kicking a blow up doll while there children watched. After the children were put with the blow up dolls and the imitated what their parents had done. From this experiment it shows that people learn from other peoples behaviours and their surroundings.
It is called Social Learning Theory as people that have the same biological parents but don't not have the same family unit will behaviour in many different ways. In order for society to not become full of unruly people, there are social policies.A social policy is guidelines to help society live in good conditions some of the social policies are laws in order to protect people. They are put in place also to help towards making people health as the governments started the welfare state. On the 1st December 1942 Sir William Beveridge wrote a report that he wanted everyone in the UK to have Social Insurance and Allied Services his idea for this to try and get people out of poverty.
Beveridge got his ideas from one of the first polices called the poor law 1598-1948.The reason he wanted social insurance more commonly known as national insurance was that working people would pay weekly percentage of their wage to the state and by doing this they would get health care for free, be paid when they were sick, unemployed, retired. Along with is he wanted there to be a minimum standard of living in the U. K. In part of this report he stated that he wanted the state to be able to look after people 'from cradle to grave', from this the National Health service (NHS) was to help people's health all the way thought their life proving full health care.
This is one of the main resources in the U. K for families to get health and advice about healthcare. This is where the families are involved in healthcare, as when one person is ill with in a nuclear family. The family will first try and treat the illness, when this does not work the family normally relies on the NHS as people will usually go to see the doctor, or if it is more serious go to hospitals were there will be no charge for the treatment, but sometimes payment is needed for prescriptions.When this NHS started there was lots of money in the government to be put in to making the service better and to maintain them but as the years have gone by the money recourses are being stretched to their limits and some sources are not being funded correctly so hospitals and healthcare centres and such like are being shut down.
(http://news. bbc. co. uk/1/hi/health/844852.
stm). As the NHS is getting in to more debt there has been a big push into promoting educating people to try and stop some of the most common illnesses that can be prevented in order for people to use the Health services less.As part of this there has been a campaigns to stop smoking, eating five fruit and vegetables a day, counting the units of alcohol that you drink and many more. From these most of them have a social policie to back them up to try and change the way socially lives' there life. One of the most resent and common polices is the Smoking Act 2005. This is a law in order to try and stop passive smoking so in all public places smoking is not permitted.
On the back of this the NHS is offending servers to help people stop smoking.The reason being that there is a 25% more chance of getting lung cancer, coronary heart dieses all things that could easily be prevented. (http://www. parliament. uk/post/pn206.
pdf) The problem that the government has with all its social policies if they are not strict laws is that many families may not want to do them and also the problem being that they are not updated enough. An example of this is Butler Act of 1944 to provide free school meals, Jamie Oliver noticed and brought it to the attention that they were not healthily school dinners.Most of the problem was this was that people are not getting educated enough in what is health to eat and what is not. With the growing increase of child hood obesity it needed to be tackled. Throughout most of Jamie's TV program there was problems with different families as the children in the show were happy to eat healthily food but because their parents (carers) didn't what to be show that they were not looking after their children right, they would not follow Jamie's advice to eat healthily.They were feeding their children unhealthy food through the school gates and the children would eat it because they think that is how to act as their parents are the ones setting the example.
From this it shows how sometimes even thought the government put policies in place it is the family that have the ultimate decision. Many families influence healthcare on relatives when they are their main careers. The reason for this is because they are the ones that spend most of the time looking after them when they have a chronic condition.This can have some advantages and disadvantages, when the person comes into nursing care within a hospital setting. The reason for this is because even though the way the carer has been looking after the other family member and everything had been going fine but when the family members illness has worsened the way they had been caring no longer works but the carer may not want to change the way they work, therefore the family health deteriates.
Also their carer could be to interfering in over the health care of the relative even though they may not understand the condition that the relative has. Advantages of having a career in the health care setting is that they can give the nurse and doctors a better insight in to what is wrong with the family member. They can also say what medication they are on and other things needed to know about their basic care.There are polices put in place for careers, these are there because when a family member becomes a carer for another person there are many problems that arise. These being financial, which can have a huge impact on things like housing, diet social life, well being and many more, because of these problems there is the Careers Act 2004 (http://www.
scie. org. uk/publications/practiceguides/carersguidance/index. asp) this helps families that have to care for someone and still get money to help them, educate them, advise them on support groups and rest bite.
Even though the state has many things put in place to help families, the state has problems when trying to keep societies in good health as they have to makes sure that everyone has personal choice, and it does not affect their religious believes, the government also has a huge problem with funding as many people were using too much of the benefits that are available, because there is enough funding there is not enough rescores which there needs to be so that people can be educated more as the more someone is educated the better there health.The government also has a problem with not meeting targets. Over the family usually has the biggest impact on a person's health at first as they are normal the first person that you go to for advice when you are unwell.
